As much as great design alone cannot make your website great — it generally also takes valuable content and proper marketing — really bad web design can absolutely make users hate your site and sink your business’ chances of success faster than you can say “animated GIF.”

Sure, there are times when a less-than-stellar-looking site provides such compelling content or such an amazing product, that it pulls you in regardless of its looks. But the vast majority of the time, delivering a quality site means having both a well-designed, easy-to-ready layout AND providing great value to your users.

Last week, I published an post on the best-designed websites in Myrtle Beach giving nods to some of the sites in our area that are both great looking and very usable. In the process of putting together this article I also came across some not-so-great design, and more than a few sites that were just plain horrible.

It’s with these outdated, unusable and just plain ugly sites in mind that I’ve come up with a few of my biggest pet peeves and web design no-no’s.

My hopes are that if just one person who reads this decides not to make their business page a Wix-hosted, Flash-fueled steaming pile of internet dog poo, I’ll have made the world a better place — at least for us designers.

Here’s a look at 5 things you shouldabsolutely never do in designing your website. Unless, of course, your goal is to make people hate your business:

1. Stretch some really tiny images.

Now that nearly everyone you know has a smartphone with a 12 megapixel camera in their pocket at all times, there’s simply no excuse for running a tiny, blurry 200 pixel wide photo — especially if it’s blown up to 300% on your homepage and pixelated to the point where you can’t barely tell if it’s a cat or a horse.

Using low-quality photos is one of the most noticeable red flags of a non-professional design. Having pixelated images, having no images or having WAY too many tiny images packed onto one page are all major design no-no’s.

There’s no exact formula to how many photos you should use or how large they should be, but just remember the point of nice photography is to draw a user in and show them what your site is all about.

Putting high quality photos and smiling people on websites has been proven to increase reader engagement and conversions, but keep in mind not to get cheesy or overdo it as users know what’s real and what’s been bought off of a stock image site.

Check out spots like Creative Commons, Flickr and morgueFile for images and make sure you give credit to the photographer when you can. And if all else fails, spend a few bucks for a real photographer (the quality is often worth it) or hire an intern with a DLSR or a find family friend with a photo hobby and ask them to help.

2. Highlight important information with colored text on a colored background.

This is a common problem that most non-designers have a tough time understanding.

Anything that makes your site harder for your users to read is a major problem. Gradients, textures, screened out boxes…these are all effective design tools when used properly and VERY dangerous ways to spell disaster when used by Joe Businessowner.

If you don’t know what you’re doing it’s best to avoid these design tricks — along with animated graphics and exotic display fonts — altogether.

Great design is all about using images, fonts and colors to direct readers/users to the most important information on the page.

The more colors and textures you use the more likely that you’re convoluting your messgae and driving folks away from what you’re offering.

When in doubt, just keep it simple. Only use a few colors and keep it high contrast when it comes to text. Black text on a white background reads great, you know.

3. Make finding your contact form like a scavenger hunt.

This one is more about user experience than just looks, but on the web usability is a big part of what makes any design work.

Making your site usable means presenting a clear path to tell users what you want them to do, whether it’s reading an article, buying a product or contacting you for more information about your services.

The worst thing you can do is make an awesome-looking site with tons of engaging content that gets users super-excited about what you have to offer and then make it impossible for them to find your phone number, shopping cart page or your contact form.

Any site worth its weight needs a distinct hierarchy to its homepage — usually driven by the use of a large image of prominent headline — and should provide a clear call to action. If it takes 2 or 3 or 4 clicks to get to the page you want them to go to you’re doing it wrong.

Oh, and while we’re at it try to make it as simple as possible for potential customers to give you their info. Yes, I know it’d be nice if you had their address, date of birth AND social security number, but please keep your form fields to a minimum.

4. Throw in pop-ups at random times.

This one won’t go over well with marketing professionals who swear by modal pop-up windows as a conversion mechanism, but as far as user experience goes, these in-site pop-ups still feel like more of an annoyance than they are worth.

There is plenty of data to suggest that these can work very well for sites when used properly — check out how Listrak uses them to collect e-mails — but there’s something about interrupting the flow of a good page design with an unsolicited call-to-action that bothers me as a designer and as a user.

I know it’s not right, but when I read I’m just as likely to click away from the page when I see a pop-up as I am to find the “X” button and close it down and get back to reading the site I sought out to read in the first place.

If you are going to decide to use a pop-up, whether to collect data, give an offer or offer customer service, make sure that you’re doing so for a reason and that you can’t simply achieve the same goal with a prominent call-to-action on the homepage.

As long as the message it short and make them easy to “X” out, most users will tolerate — and maybe even utilize — the pop-up window, but for God’s sake keep them to a minimum.

5. If all else fails, autoplay some loud ass music.

With the possible exception of a band website — and I tend to think even that’s a stretch nowadays — there’s no reason to “treat” your users with an autoplaying version of your favorite tune.

Even if you think “These Boots Are Made For Walking” is right for your shoe store or “I Love This Bar” is perfect for your sports saloon, there’s a good chance your users will simply see the extra click to pause the music as horribly annoying.

Also, its pretty likely that a big portion of your traffic will come from professionals browsing the web during work hours. And nothing drives an office-dweller to click away from your site faster than loud music blasting out from their cubicle while the boss lurks nearby.

Just in case you need a reminder check out “Sounds of the Internet” for some of the best (i.e. worst) autoplay sites on the web.

A few more ways to piss people off…

In no particular order, here’s a couple more major design no-no’s to avoid:

• Having 5 calls-to-action on your homepage. One is enough.

• Telling people to follow you on Facebook or Twitter and having a broken link or inactive profile.

• Using Flash animation of any kind. Especially in the navigation.

• Excessively bolding words. Yes, that means you too old school SEOs.

• Having too many Google ads. You’re not going to get rich off the 15 visits per week to your plumbing blog. Just stop it.

• Using entire paragraphs of ALL CAPS in body copy.

• Using the same stock WordPress theme that’s been kicking around since 2005. Something like this.

In part two of “What Gear Do I Need?”, I’ll be walking through what gear out need to get started in photography.

Photography? You might wonder. Why would I care about photography? Can’t I just take photos with my mobile phone? I mean its got 8 megapixels. That’s all the matters.

Well, not really. Without writing a book about the technical aspects of photography, there’s a lot more to quality photos than just megapixels. So, if you’re a small business owner or a representative of a small or medium size business, you’re going to want high quality photos to show off yourself/your product/location, ect.

Why should I want to take good quality photos for my website/business?

Well, reader, getting high quality photos on your website had been proven to convert better and show better trust signals to users. A local business with high quality photos on the home pages and interior pages will appear more legitimate to users, increasing your time on site and reaching the goals of your web property.

So now you know why higher quality photos on your website can help, what do you need to get started?

Body

There are dozens of camera makers from Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Canon and many more. Any modern DSLR or mirrorless camera is pretty capable of taking decent photos with a kit lens and lots of light on your subject. My personal cameras are of the Micro Four Third variety, which is a shared platform with Panasonic and Olympus utilizing the same lenses and sensor sizes. Recently at IM, we got a Canon T5i, another very popular model of DSLR’s from Canon. That camera handles itself very well, but is a bit large to carry around. The benefits of one of these smaller cameras (like a Olympus EPL5) is the compact handling and size. You can easily fit a MFT camera in a cargo pocket or purse given you’ve attached a pancake lens to it. This can be advantageous to carrying the camera with you everywhere. If you do any kind of web marketing for a local business, or you are a local business, being able to capture high resolution quality photos will be the benefits we talked about above.

Lens

After you’ve selected a camera body, I would recommend skipping the kit lens and investing that money into a faster lens (faster: meaning letting in more light, allowing for better low light photos). For Olympus and Panasonic cameras, the excellent 20mm 1.7 is awesome for general purpose photos of people, products or locations. For Nikon and Canon, both make 50mm lenses they make with wide apertures that take good photos of people, products or locations.

Technique

Perhaps too difficult to sum up in a short paragraph, good photo technique takes years to master. For general purposes, line up your photos from more than one angle and more than one vantage point. Looking at medium, high and low points from multiple angles might show you a line you didn’t see before. If you’re in doubt, take tons of photos. Memory is pretty cheap nowadays. Don’t be afraid to explore and find out what works best for you. Maybe you’re looking to do head shots for your staff on a “Employee” page. This might require a flash, tripod and background. Research and find out what the pros do for whatever you’re looking to photograph. A portrait headshot is a lot different than product photography or landscape. Research (information is plentiful) and find the lens/technique that works best.

Summary

Using a modern DSLR or mirrorless camera with a nice lens attached will allow you to take photos you may have previously thought were not possible. Using these photos on your website or for a business is worth the extra effort. It will provide a nice design aesthetic for your web property and tell potential customers and clients you care about the details. High quality photos of you or your products has been proven to convert better, leading more people to your website and reaching your goals.

]]>http://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/photo-what-gear-do-i-need/feed/0How to be Less Lame on Social Mediahttp://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/how-to-be-less-lame-on-social-media/
http://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/how-to-be-less-lame-on-social-media/#commentsThu, 01 Aug 2013 16:00:26 +0000jessicahttp://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/?p=6083Read More »]]>

Around ID, we spend a lot of time looking at every one’s social media, and let’s face it, some people just need some help.

Here is a little tribute to all the online fails I see everyday.

Selfies

Let’s get one thing straight: with all the amazing apps out there for taking selfies and making them awesome, is there any reason why I still see douchey mirror pics with bad lighting and distracting backgrounds?

So as OmniCom and Publicis merge and @AimClear launches their Pink Sheep awards where they named the people they would clone tomorrow it started thinking about building the agency dream team. The people on our list aren’t getting cloned tomorrow and they aren’t part of the huge merger but when combined on one team they would be able to take on any client and outperform all of the huge agencies. If you don’t know the face it’s definitely someone you should know. Clicking on each of the links below will take you to their twitter account so you can get to know them a bit better.

Tell us what you think? Who should of been on our ultimate list of digital marketers? Who shouldn’t of been on the list? Leave us a comment so we can keep the list up to date! We will also be reaching out for personal interviews with each of the dream team members so stay tuned!

Here at IM, we deal with a lot of software everyday. From industry specific packages like Raven Tools to our standby software like Pages and Basecamp, all of our staff spends a moderate amount of the day looking at some software package.

Nearly all of them claim to be the best at whatever they do. In this mini-series, I plan on showing you a few tools that you’re likely in need of, but haven’t quite understood or didn’t know you needed. First up, I’d like to talk about Droplr, a simple file sharing service that makes your life easier.

Droplr bills itself the “world’s easiest way to share & host images, notes, files & more online … all for free.” I believe this is a pretty apt description of the service. The reason that I’ve been so happy so far is the frictionless nature of sharing files with Droplr. I’ve even upgraded to the Pro service for those extra perks that they offer.

My Workflow:

About a dozen times a day, I have to share something with either a client or a co-worker. In the past, I’d have to deal with e-mail attachments, file sharing services or dropbox shared files. These all work fine, but it was always a bit of a chore to share files. I’d have to save the file, code snippet or image, move it to the desktop and then upload, find the share URL and send. With Droplr, I’ve dropped the time of sharing files and getting them into a email down to a few seconds. Pretty awesome, right?

The key is the super functional menu bar application (for Mac). It sits at the top of my screen at all times, ready to grab anything I throw at it and (here’s the cool part for me) automatically copy a shareable URL to my clipboard. That means that file I quickly saved on the desktop is uploaded in a few seconds, while I open my email client and start composing an email. Then, I get an awesome pop-up notification telling me the file is already living in my clipboard. I paste that in, and I’m done.

Some benefits of using Droplr over plain email attachments and Dropbox shared files for me are statistics and short links (oh no, my analytics cred is leaking). Yes, clients, I know if you’ve viewed a file or not. I can view how many people view a short link I share on Twitter or Facebook. I can see these statistics super quickly, right in the drop down menu inside the application. This is great for seeing link share metrics across different networks. For example, you could generate a short link for differeent people to pass around and see which link gets the most views. Another benefit of using Droplr to share content is the note composer, which has options for plain text, code and Markdown. If you’re a Markdown user like me, quickly writing a HTML valid blog post is possible in this small editor. I use Droplr for all my Google Analytics and other various tracking codes to save line breaks in place, and it even highlights Javascript synax to view potential errors in your code.

Those Extra Features:

I’ve gone ahead and paid for the pro subscription which adds a lot of space (100 gigabytes for you design people out there) as well as some features like a custom URL (I have chosen cnrad.pw for my personal use) and removed ads. I also love the audio “pop” that Droplr makes when the URL has been added to your clipboard. It’s really little touches that make applications like this delight to use.

In summary, Droplr solves a problem that I didn’t really find too annoying until I used their service. The frictionless file sharing and nice touches like a custom URL and well-designed mobile and desktop applications make this my first pick for Tools We Like. Stay tuned for future installments where I dive into some other daily use applications.

]]>http://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/tools-we-like-droplr/feed/0Video: What Gear Do I Need To Get Started?http://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/video-what-gear-do-i-need-to-get-started/
http://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/video-what-gear-do-i-need-to-get-started/#commentsTue, 30 Jul 2013 12:56:05 +0000Conrad O'Connellhttp://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/?p=6000Read More »]]>

Here at Interactivity Marketing, we have recently set up a small in-office studio to shoot short promotional videos, content ideas and everything in between. However, finding the right setup proved to be a little tricky. We got a lot of feedback about which cameras work, which ones are not as good as well as mixed signals about lighting, lens setup and gear requirements. Hopefully our learning process will help you set up a small studio of your own without as much fuss.

All in all, we spent right around $2,000, which may seem like a lot, but in actually pales in comparison to a local video studio producing even a few two-minute videos. Over the long term, setting up the video studio for normal amounts of video shoots will save you a ton of money versus that production house, especially for lots of quick informal videos.

At the drop of a hat, we can go from idea to video shoot in about three minutes. That type of freedom is awesome for sharing high-quality relevant video content with your audience.

Enough about that, though. How about the gear?

For starters, we went with a Canon T5i camera. Canon is known for high quality video DSLR’s, and this is no exception. The camera has handled itself very well in our testing so far. The high definition 1080p video straight from the camera looks stunning (although we end up downsampling the video content we have been uploading so far to make load times snappy). With some higher level features we plan on testing later, just propping the Canon on a nice tripod and shooting straight from the camera footage has been excellent.

The lens we’ve attached to the T5i is the 40mm pancake STM lens. These lenses are supposed to be good for smooth autofocus. Due to my expectations of my personal mirrorless camera setup, I was a little disappointed in the performance of this lens. The videos are sharp and the stills look good, but the autofocus seems to hunt far too often for nice video use. I have used manual focus on every video so far and that’s proven to be far better. I am not sure if there’s more tweaking to be done here, but it’s worth noting that shooting moving subjects may require a more experienced videographer to nail manual focus on a moving subject.

Underneath that lens and camera combo is the Ravelli APGL4 tripod. Yes, there are thousands of cheaper tripods and will hold a DSLR and lens. However, the super solid feel of this metal tripod is worth the extra money. It has built in levels and smooth clips, and a nice hand grip for panning shots as well. Buy a nice tripod, cheap out elsewhere if you must.

The trickiest part was learning the various lighting systems and work well for video. Ideally, the more light the better. We went with a four stand setup, with each stand hosting four bulbs. All in all, 16 bulbs pointed at one subject is enough light to capture details, eliminate shadows and reduce reflections across the subjects body. You can cheap out here and built your own stands, but I do recommend adding a soft white paper for that ‘lightbox’ look. It really evens out the shadows and makes the subject’s eyes hurt less. I’d rather my subject be able to see after the shoot!

Lastly, microphones also seem to be a point of contention for many video guys. For high quality presentation, the on board microphone isn’t going to cut it. We went with a very nice wireless Sennheiser microphone that will grow with us as we do two/three person videos. In most rooms, you can rock a boom mic with no issues.

That does mostly it all for the hardware. Software wise, I’ve been using iMovie to add transitions, intros and small sound effects. Adding music tracks, small transitions and logos is super simple. It performs well even on some late 2009 iMacs we have here at the office.

All in all, I’m impressed with the results.

With about $1,500, you could be producing high quality videos and have a nice stills camera to boot. You can view the awesome work we’ve been doing below. For an agency likes us, growing with ideas and clients, our initial push into video has been a fun experience so far!

So you have been busting your ass to grow a huge list and now Google comes and messes it all up. They have introduced new “tabs” and “categories” meant to make your life easier. Easier they say. Yeah right. It’s an email marketers nightmare. All marketing related messages are lumped into a “Promotions” category and this makes it really easy for those subscribed to your list to miss your important promotional messages.

So what do we do you shoot an email to your entire database? Do you send to those who only have gmail? The best way to do it is to watch your list and only send to those who are truly missing out. Watch the list and see who actually stopped opening your emails and send them a personal email so you hit the Primary folder and get to actually educate them on how to fix this issue.

]]>http://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/the-new-gmail-inbox-by-promotions-social-and-primary/feed/0Who has the best designed website in Myrtle Beach?http://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/who-has-the-best-designed-website-in-myrtle-beach/
http://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/who-has-the-best-designed-website-in-myrtle-beach/#commentsFri, 26 Jul 2013 07:51:36 +0000Chrishttp://www.InteractivityMarketing.com/?p=5925Read More »]]>

When people ask me what I do for a living I generally tell them this:

“I look at websites all day & tell people how bad they are.”

While this may be an overly simplistic — not to mention a bit sarcastic — way to describe digital marketing, there’s definitely some truth to the fact that we as marketers spend a great deal of time looking at bad websites and trying to convince their owners to let us make them good.

This process can be especially tough for designers, as our artistic ambitions often don’t match up with a business’ branding or client’s vision, leading to hours and hours spent slaving away on work we’re not proud of.

But even though this battle to find a balance between function and flair can be challenging, when clients and creatives do manage get on the same page, the results are often quite stunning.

It’s with this in mind that I recently decided to search out of some of the best Myrtle Beach web design I could find. Having browsed the Grand Strand’s interwebs for years both personally and professionally I had no trouble finding some amazing examples of design done right (and also plenty of design disasters) worth sharing.

Here’s a look at my own list of the best-designed websites in Myrtle Beach:

Take a second to browse the list, then vote below on which ones you like the most. I’ll reveal the winner during my presentation at our upcoming #IDMyr one-day event on Aug. 27 at Legends In Concert and talk more about what your business can learn from these sites.

Aspen Grille

With clean look and a textured splash of color accented by some Rosemary and other herbs, the design of this site is as fresh and inviting as the fine dining spot’s delectable cuisine. www.aspen-grille.com

Barefoot Church

Not only is this North Myrtle Beach church trying to change lives through God, it is also trying to change things up with an interesting and eye-catching tiled design for its website. http://barefootchurch.com/

Boulineau’s

This colorful design features visuals that flow well from the eye-catching and iconic Lighthouse to the logo and onto the main content portion of the site. Appealing images all around with weekly specials prominent on the front page. www.boulineaus.com

Brookgreen Gardens

Simple and as elegant as the gardens themselves, this site features good, solid typography that accents the scripts and serifs of the Brookgreen logo. It also creates depth in a subtle way with the statue at the top poking up into the colored bar above. www.brookgreen.org

The Dunes Golf & Beach Club

Sites with full-width photos have been very popular over the past few years, and though I’m not always a big fan, I think it works really well on this homepage to showcase the beauty of the golf course. www.thedunesclub.net

Motto

This branding and design agency run by a pair of local ladies not only does awesome work, but definitely delivers a great website to showcase it all. Featuring bold typography, a stripped down color palette and a great parallax scrolling effect (where the background images stay put while the content scrolls) that’s very popular right now. http://wearemotto.com/

Myrtle Beach International Airport

The new terminal opened this April isn’t the only thing new out at MYR this year. The airport also has a brand-new website with a refreshed design that’s clean, colorful and flows well while also displaying the most important info prominently at the top of the page. www.flymyrtlebeach.com

Pawleys Island Festival of Music & Art

The annual celebration of south end culture spans three weeks in September and October. Its website draws you in with a bright design and prominent photography up top, them draws you into its rich information with a number of promo tiles featuring engaging, yet not overwhelming rollover effects. http://pawleysmusic.com/

Myrtle Beach SkyWheel

Much like the Skywheel itself this site stands out from the crowd with an eye-catching main image that blends beautifully into the “sky blue” background. Clean tiled design downpage. http://myrtlebeachskywheel.com/

The Bowery

Combining history and hedonism with a heavy dose of honky tonk is what The Bowery does best, and a quick glance at this site reveals all those elements represented in equal measure. www.thebowery.com

Visit Myrtle Beach

The Myrtle Beach Area Convention and Visitors Bureau updated the design of its main tourism site earlier this year to include a great-looking, wide header image and attractive subtle textures throughout the site. VisitMyrtleBeach.com also does a good job of taking A TON of information and making it digestable through a user-friendly menu and a cool little slider effect downpage that flips out content based on whether the user is looking for hotels, atttractions or activities. www.visitmyrtlebeach.com

It is not a redeeming quality. It’s also not a good fit for someone who has to creatively think of strategies and ideas for clients. If you’re anything like me, you’ve had the next business idea in your head before. But you can’t remember. Let’s not let that million dollar idea slip by us again.

Let’s work on capturing those ideas. The key for any person (in any industry) is capturing ideas in a safe, trustworthy place for later review. To help me with this, I have created several in-depth workflows involving reminders, scripts, Dropbox rules and applications. However, you don’t need very much to get started. If you’re like me, you have an iPhone in your pocket. This amazing computer is an excellent tool for capturing ideas and placing them in a system for review.

Step One: Capture.

I have a secret weapon in the ‘capture’ workflow. Drafts, an iPhone and iPad application that at it’s basic core, is just a text box. Every time I open Drafts on my iPhone (it’s in my dock) it’s ready for me to type. I can go from idea to typing in about 3 seconds (I timed it!).

This is the first step. Install Drafts on your phone. (Note: Android users: I have been told that Google Keep is an excellent app for a very similar workflow). After that’s done, start typing! Throw your ideas in here. Go wild. Don’t worry about tagging, organizing or sorting. Just keep dumping everything from your brain into text. This brain dump is the key to getting rid of those nagging ideas hidden away. As you’re typing an idea, do not be surprised if three or four more pop up as you’re thinking. This physical process of putting your ideas down is mentally freeing.

Second Two: Process

After your awesome brain dump session, you must deal with all of those awesome ideas. It doesn’t have to be right away or even that day, but take time every couple days or at minimum once a week to go though and find a place for these ideas. It may be a client file in Basecamp or whatever your client manager tool is. That part is up to you (and a whole new blog post as well!) but finding that safe place to keep notes and to-do’s a a crucial part to this workflow. Your excellent ideas are no good if they never see the light of day!

Step Three: Profit?

Well, this part is REALLY up to you. After you’ve devoted some time to capturing your ideas in a fast and useful way, your brain is free to work on other client stuff. Go do something amazing.

Well, as much as you may not want to admit it, the days of being able to make quality tunes and simply “get discovered” are long gone.

They’ve been replaced by an era of DIY tools and self-promotion that gives anybody with a computer and a song in their heart the chance to grow a devoted audience of fans across the globe.

But since you’ve taken the time to read this, I’m going to assume you already know this.

You know that actually making it in music — or even just surviving as a working musician or weekend warrior — involves a fair share of marketing and promotion as well as grinding for gigs, fans and followers.

I’m also going to guess that at this point your marketing team isn’t any bigger than you and your girlfriend, your mom or your bandmates.

But that’s OK. Some of best marketing in the world is done by small, dedicated teams of people.

The good news is growing your fanbase, much like creating a digital marketing campaign, doesn’t take much more than a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of creativity, which is something any good musician should have plenty of.

As someone who’s spent a lot of time observing the music world — having run my own music magazine for a number of years — I’ve been amazed how well the skills I learned in helping promote bands has transitioned into a career in Marketing.

I’ve been even more amazed, however, by how much digital marketing basics can be applied back to music and by how few artists I see taking advantage of this.

Here’s a look a few super simple marketing ideas that can help boost your band’s effectiveness in online promotion.

Nikola Spasenoski / Shutterstock.com

1. Know your audience.

Before you can begin marketing to your fans or potential fans, the most important thing is to identify who your target fanbase is.

Here’s a hint: It’s not “Anyone who will listen to our music.”

This can be tough to do as it means checking your ego a bit and realizing that not everyone is going to like your music.

The sooner you can stop trying to be the next Rolling Stones or Beatles and admit that your fans are mostly middle-aged guys with beards and flannel shirts or teenagers with dyed hair and skinny jeans, the sooner you can begin building a real, authentic niche of devoted fans.

That’s not to say that you need to pigeonhole yourself into only having fans that fit a certain stereotype or mold, but defining this “typical fan” persona will help you realize what it is about your music that people connect to and will give you a focus for all your marketing efforts.

Once you’ve gotten a picture of what your target fan looks like, begin to think about where these people hang out (both online and in real life), what other sorts of things they like and how they interact with each other.

Anytime you’re putting together a show lineup, a new t-shirt design or making a new music video, take a second and think “Will our fans like this?”

The more often you can do things with your fans in mind, instead of just because you think they’re cool, the better off you’ll be.

2. Focus on the right channels.

One of the biggest misconceptions among bands — like businesses — is that just because a social media platform exists you need to have a presence.

Because there are lots and lots of avenues to promote your music, your natural instinct is to want to be involved in every one of them to maximize your chances of “being discovered.”

But just think, what if a record executive did somehow happen upon your profile at Zazzle, Purevolume, Vibedeck, Mixconnect, Souncheck or one of the millions of other little niche music promotion sites out there.

Would they be impressed? Or would they see a half-assed profile description, an old promo photo and a few random, unmastered tracks you threw up there in 2009 and haven’t touched since?

Unless you can find time to keep up with 8-10 different social accounts then keep it simple (and if you do have time for that much social media you’re porbably in the wrong business).

By limiting the places you promote yourself and scrapping the rest, you can ensure that what fans find when they come across your music online is a current, accurate and well maintained representation of what you do.

A good rule of thumb would be to engage regularly on one of the two biggest social networks — Facebook or Twitter — and use one of the top music sites — Reverbnation, Soundcloud or Youtube — to post and promote your music.

Which one you use will depend on personal preference and what best suits your fans, but honestly any network can be effective as long as you post consistently, keep your fans interests in mind (don’t just post about yourself) and let new and potential fans know where to find you.

3. Deliver value.

One of the biggest mistakes artists make is that they can’t see past their own nose when marketing their music.

Yes, it’s easy to be so devoted to your music and your message that you get caught up in what you’re doing, but at the end of the day if your goal is to get more people to listen to you, a large part of what you do to promote needs to be about them.

Make sure every time you’re communicating with fans — whether through social media and e-mail or in person and on stage — you let them know why they should care.

Don’t say things like “I’d would really appreciate it if you came out to my show. It would mean so much to me.” That’s self-serving and not particularly persuasive.

That might work for your mom or your best friend, but it will never appeal to someone who caught you in a bar once and is a casual fan of your music.

When you’re posting a new track try to avoid saying something like “Come Check out my new album and let me know what you think.”

Again, this is inwardly focused and all about you, so people may not really care unless they really care about you as a person.

Also, it’s a bit misleading, because chances are you don’t really want to hear what they think … you want them to tell you how great it is. If they don’t like and and they tell you so, you’d probably be pissed and start posting back at them (also, a VERY bad idea.)

Instead, of sending these types of messages make sure your posts and promotions talk about the benefits a fan would get from attending one of your shows, buying an album or downloading your latest mixtape.

Tell them why it will be a positive experience and make sure you go out of your way to deliver that experience.

If you’re sending out e-mails why not take the extra few minutes to personalize them. Instead starting with “Hey everyone, thanks for keeping up with our band…” try something like “Howdy Jenny, thanks for coming to our latest show, here’s what we’ve been up to lately…”

I’ve seen bands who take photos of everyone who buys merch at their shows and post them all to Facebook with a Thank You message. People love feeling like you care and seeing themselves online.

Everyone’s favorite subject is themselves, so the more you can play on that and personalize your marketing online, the more they’ll love you.

Also, take the extra time to say hello to fans and let them know you appreciate them taking the time to listen or spending the money on cover to see you.

Because regardless of how great your online marketing is, connecting with people in real life is just as important.